Just a little bit of grinding going on? I think that the highest level I ever hit by game's end might have been 40-50. To be honest, I NEVER really paid that much attention to the levels or rank titles. All I cared about was the ability to "grow" my stats. As long as I never hit a plateau (long dry spell with no promotion), I didn't notice levels at all.

I've been trying to grind up a party's level and it takes forever. I have a Combat Captain (levels 47-50) and that's after a couple dozen playthroughs. I can only assume people hit Supreme Jerk by walking into the rubbish under Spade's Casino for a couple days. Literally.

The biggest argument I've ever read against level caps had to do with the usefulness of skills. If you can one shot the end boss at level 20, then there really is no need to go beyond level 20. However, if there exists encounters more challenging than the end boss, there is always a use for more levels. Like going through Disgaea, where doing 7 digit damage is not only desirable, but necessary.

Lol, how the hell do you hit the level cap in Arcanum? I did basically everything there is to do in that game and didn't get even close. The cap shouldn't even be an issue in that game unless you're deliberately trying to min-max your character.

Personally I feel like I spend a lot more time designing a character and am a hell of a lot more careful choosing perks when I know there's a level cap. Without a level cap I feel kinda lazy about it, as if I can make up for bad character design simply by grinding extra and choosing them later. I honestly like knowing that I can't max out all of my skills and become some ungodly superman just by killing thousands of rats. This is especially true in a party based game, where letting one player hoard all of the EXP means that the other characters could effectively become deadweight.

Personally I feel like a "natural" level cap is the best solution, in that monsters would give progressively less experience proportional to the number of levels you are above them. For example, if the toughest monster in the game was level 50, then you would only get a trickle of EXP from beating it at lv 55, and you wouldn't get any more EXP at all from killing it at level 56. That way if there was a New Game +, a "hard mode", or a mod/expansion with tougher content you would still have opportunities to progress your character further. But the idea that you NEED to have continuous level growth to have any sense of progression feels kind of ridiculous to me, I'd much rather we focus on fine tuning skills (if there is a dynamic skill growth system like in the TES series) and exploration in endgame.

Vryheid wrote:Personally I feel like I spend a lot more time designing a character and am a hell of a lot more careful choosing perks when I know there's a level cap. Without a level cap I feel kinda lazy about it, as if I can make up for bad character design simply by grinding extra and choosing them later.

Bethesda games like Oblivion and Skyrim where your character can have 100 in every skill in other words. No thanks. At least Skyrim limited the perks.

Level caps are necessary to limit your character. Especially in a party based game having limits is a good thing. A party based game is diminished by creating a character that can do everything. If you really want that you can just cheat. Seriously it's ok with me. It's a single player game. I don't see the argument that human characters should have NO limits as a very compelling one. Wander the wastes with your party of gods?

All that said I prefer a soft cap whereby XP gains are either limited (no respawning monsters or quests for example) or eventually diminish to 0 as another poster suggested. That way once you hit the max level you won't have anything left to do so you won't have to play without advancing in level.

Baldur's Gate is still one of my favorite games and caps you at about 7th level.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams

Shady314 wrote:Bethesda games like Oblivion and Skyrim where your character can have 100 in every skill in other words

No, because MSPE is a very very different system from the Elder Scrolls games. You don't get skill points at every level up (you get attribute points, which can be spent on IQ to give you skill points, but skill point costs grow exponentially). You don't get a huge increase in hit points at each level (2 per level, and you can spend your 2 attribute points on more; a starting character could have as much as 40). Your combat ability doesn't increase at all because you levelled.

A Supreme Jerk - level 183 - might be 10 times as powerful as a starting character, but will still lose if the starting character has better gear.

Shady314 wrote:Bethesda games like Oblivion and Skyrim where your character can have 100 in every skill in other words

No, because MSPE is a very very different system from the Elder Scrolls games. You don't get skill points at every level up (you get attribute points, which can be spent on IQ to give you skill points, but skill point costs grow exponentially). You don't get a huge increase in hit points at each level (2 per level, and you can spend your 2 attribute points on more; a starting character could have as much as 40). Your combat ability doesn't increase at all because you levelled.

A Supreme Jerk - level 183 - might be 10 times as powerful as a starting character, but will still lose if the starting character has better gear.

I may have been unclear because I mentioned Baldur's Gate or other games. You know a level 82 character in Skyrim is not that much more powerful than a lower level character provided they've maxed an armor and weapon skill. Depending on the difficulty you play on. Gear makes the biggest difference there too.

I don't need the level cap to be LOW. The devs can make it 5 or 5000 as long as there are actually challenges for a level 5000. Also I don't want the max level character to have every skill at max rank. I'm not against powerful PC's but ones that can do everything are boring.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams

krellen wrote:And I was trying to explain to you that "skill level" - and even just "having a skill" - is completely divorced from "levelling up".

I never got to play wasteland 1 as I was barely out of diapers when it released but I watched most of a let's play to sate my curiosity and read up on it. I'm familiar with the libraries/skill usage and how the leveling up works with the points. But I don't recall having heard Brian Fargo say the skill/leveling up system is going to work exactly the same in WL2. So until then I am just contributing to this topic and saying what I generally prefer and why.

EDIT: I had thought that level affected your rank and your rank limited your max skill level and that at higher levels this was a non-issue but at least in the beginning leveling up and skill level weren't "completely" divorced. Also didn't you have to level up to get enough points to increase your IQ high enough for certain late game skills like cyborg tech? I apologize for not being very experienced with the system. Like I said never got to actually play it.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams

Shady314 wrote:EDIT: I had thought that level affected your rank and your rank limited your max skill level and that at higher levels this was a non-issue but at least in the beginning leveling up and skill level weren't "completely" divorced. Also didn't you have to level up to get enough points to increase your IQ high enough for certain late game skills like cyborg tech? I apologize for not being very experienced with the system. Like I said never got to actually play it.

Yes, high level skills required an IQ of 23 or 24 to learn (plus the 3 or 4 spare skill points to learn it). Completely divorced was probably an unfair hyperbole on my part, but I was just combating your "high level means every skill" thing.

And while rank did limit your max skill, gaining a level didn't give you skill levels, or retroactively grant skill increases you may have otherwise gained but were constrained by that max skill ceiling. You still had to gain the skill up by using the skill. (And note, if you did not have at least 1 level of a skill trained, you could never increase it, no matter how often you did things associated with it.)

krellen wrote:Completely divorced was probably an unfair hyperbole on my part, but I was just combating your "high level means every skill" thing.

Then that's my fault for being unclear. Let me try to be clear so no one else combats me. I liked the WL system I saw. I hope/expect InXile to use it again or a very similar system.

I was simply referencing other games where no level cap usually would go hand in hand with all skills/powers/whatever at high to max ranks. Also the "no level cap argument" is one I have had many times (unfortunately) and someone always makes the argument (As Son of Max did here) that it's ridiculous or makes no sense that a character might stop growing or learning past a certain point but I find the opposite to be true. No one can do it all and humans have natural limitations. I prefer systems that reflect this mechanically.

“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” -Douglas Adams

Lets be honest if they have learned anything in 24 years since the creation of wasteland it should be that levels shouldn't exist as the base for progression of characters. Skills have and always will be more important and that's where they should focus their efforts in developing a smart skills system for us to progress through the game that lets us develop characters the way we want and in the styles we want them to play in.

If my characters a sniper I want him to learn from being a sniper! As he sneaks around his sneaking gets better, as he does heals others/himself his first aid/doctor gets better, as he repairs, lockpicks and hacks they should get better.

A system that develops my characters as I'm playing them is far better then some poorly thought out system that rewards me experience based on killing things. Sure you could say this is basically a guise by which every skill is now a level bracket and every action you do related to that system simply earns you experience within that skill but the stupid notion that I get better at sneaking, lockpicking, repairing, etc, etc by killing a monster, robot, freak, wateva is even more stupid.

I agree with no level caps but to hell with levels in the general sense altogether.

Godcomplex: Screw balance, if I want to become the Übermensch and lay waste to all that stand in my path with nothing more than a crowbar and a smile, then let it be so.

A god damn true statement, so many people worry about balance but forget that the greatest thing about CRPG was freedom of choice and the absolute random shit you could pull off going to extremes in like say explosives

Level cap is OK as long as it's very unlikely to reach it, I think. I'd rather see a game that is well balanced and acknowledges your levels but has a cap (e.g. unique perks that keep coming even at hard-to-reach levels, has rank names) than a game that just keeps lazily spitting levels at you that only increases your stats.

The problem with Arcanum wasn't the cap, but the fact that you always reached that cap in a regular playthrough. I think Fallout 2 felt really good in that regard. You always had a next level to look forward to, even after lots of grinding, and I still have no idea if there's a cap in place or not.

rezakon wrote:Lets be honest if they have learned anything in 24 years since the creation of wasteland it should be that levels shouldn't exist as the base for progression of characters. Skills have and always will be more important and that's where they should focus their efforts in developing a smart skills system for us to progress through the game that lets us develop characters the way we want and in the styles we want them to play in.

If my characters a sniper I want him to learn from being a sniper! As he sneaks around his sneaking gets better, as he does heals others/himself his first aid/doctor gets better, as he repairs, lockpicks and hacks they should get better.

A system that develops my characters as I'm playing them is far better then some poorly thought out system that rewards me experience based on killing things. Sure you could say this is basically a guise by which every skill is now a level bracket and every action you do related to that system simply earns you experience within that skill but the stupid notion that I get better at sneaking, lockpicking, repairing, etc, etc by killing a monster, robot, freak, wateva is even more stupid.

I agree with no level caps but to hell with levels in the general sense altogether.

Godcomplex: Screw balance, if I want to become the Übermensch and lay waste to all that stand in my path with nothing more than a crowbar and a smile, then let it be so.

A god damn true statement, so many people worry about balance but forget that the greatest thing about CRPG was freedom of choice and the absolute random shit you could pull off going to extremes in like say explosives

Sounds like you want skyrims horrible autolevel feature. No thanks, I want to customize the character I want the way I want. Not have the game do it for me. There are skills that you need/want to level up, but you just can't use them enough to get them high. Sneak/lockpicking/speech for example. Your just not going to use them as much as other skills, so no thanks. Also, as you get higher in levels, it will slow down, so I don't see a reason for level caps. If someone wants to keep leveling up, let them, that is part of the fun in RPG's.

hiptanaka wrote:I think Fallout 2 felt really good in that regard. You always had a next level to look forward to, even after lots of grinding, and I still have no idea if there's a cap in place or not.

The level cap in FO2 is 99. So yeah, NOT likely to ever reach it. I agree that the game balance was quite good. At the end of the game you could kick some serious ass, but if you ran into an Enclave patrol and were going solo, you were going to get your ass handed to you. The only way I was ever able to kill absolutely anything with impunity was when I had a big and high level party, mostly equipped with both gauss and pulse rifles.

I don't like level caps, but I'd be fine with a really high one like that.

Yeah, I don't generally like level caps either. If the cap is unattainable, then it is basically the same thing...however, inXile should keep in consideration that many people will sink a lot of time into the game, especially if new content is created by modders, so the cap should be flexible enough for that as well.

I'm the type of gamer that loves to start out with a fairly average character, but build him up to that incredibly tough to kill badass that laughs in the face of any enemy trying to take me by him/herself.